The Map and the Territory: A Novel

Decorate a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee, and you have a humorous take on classical painting, thought Marcel Duchamp. Paint a pipe, and beneath it, the wry caption, “this is not a pipe.” Witty, to René Magritte. There’s fearful symmetry between the curvature of a woman’s back and a violin, so paint f-holes on a model, photograph her, and call it “Le Violon d’Ingres.” Woman as painter’s violin, and, idiomatically, woman as hobby, to Man Ray. Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski, writing a few years later, aphorized, “the map is not the territory,” which illustrates precisely the tensions between representation and abstraction, object and ontology, in these canonical modernist works.

Fabled French misanthrope Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, an affectively taut, tempered narrative awarded the 2010 Prix Goncourt for “best and most imaginative prose work of the year,” draws its title and message from Korzybski’s bon mot. Dramatis personæ: contemporary artist Jed Martin, who photographs Michelin maps, then becomes renowned for his “Series of Simple Professions” and celebrity portraiture; his father Jean-Pierre, a Corbusier-hating architect and “finished man” whose quixotic blueprints languish in storage while he executes practical works of draftsmanship, and, in a stroke of sardonic self-awareness and gallows humor, the “old turtle” Michel Houellebecq, who makes a cameo when hired to write catalog copy for one of Jed’s solo exhibitions. The neurasthenic, solitary Jed fosters a caring yet tense relationship with Jean-Pierre, falls in love with Olga, a striking Michelin PR rep, and befriends Houellebecq, a “tired old decadent” and “tortured wreck” whose idiosyncrasies (like the idea of purchasing a sheep, rather than a lawnmower, to tend his front yard) he appreciates in a measured if detached manner. Jed’s accession to the heights of success is rendered painful by the loss of his father to rectal cancer and physician-assisted suicide, and by the murder of Houellebecq by a thief who robs him of a portrait Jed painted of him, then brutally beheads him and his dog, decorating the writer’s living room with the remains.

The novel’s spare beauty pivots on mood rather than action, abstraction rather than representation, territory rather than map. It’s an anatomy of male melancholy, an exposition of the refrain “it doesn’t amount to much, a human life.” Characters who try to understand life or art—critics, whose formal terminology is italicized, and Houellebecq, who writes the catalog essay—are satirized or killed. Even Jed, whose career is “devoted…to the production of representations of the world, in which people were never meant to live,” moves away from maps as artistic inspiration. Initially seeing them as “the essence of modernity, of scientific and technical apprehension of the world…combined with the essence of animal life…the thrill, the appeal, of human lives, of dozens and hundreds of souls,” he later realizes they’re attempts to impose a fixative on mutable territory.

Abstractions remain beautiful, but representations are distorted. Houellebecq’s repurchased childhood home, an “absolutely miraculous” place in his mind’s eye, becomes the scene of his grisly murder. The semblance of a Jackson Pollock painting is actually the trailing pattern of blood from Houellebecq’s severed head. Jean-Pierre’s unrealized blueprints are merely the stirrings of derivative, impracticable thought. Wealth, even when earned, doesn’t redress pain or decay, but makes artists disdainful of others, whereas “to be an artist, in [Jed’s] view, was above all to be someone submissive.” Jed bitterly quips that Damien Hirst’s attitude is, “I shit on you from the top of my pile of cash,” and in an enraged Dorian Gray moment, plunges a knife into his portrait of Hirst and Jeff Koons.

The Map and the Territory’s message is best captured by Leonard Cohen in “The Darkness,” featured on his newly released album, “Old Ideas.” “I got the darkness/ From your little ruby cup…There’s nothing but the darkness/ Makes any sense to me at all,” he sings. The novel sets up a tension between Jed’s purist, functionalist view of art, his lack of artistic ethos, and his objection to criticism, and Jean-Pierre’s visionary but ultimately dyspeptic outlook. That tension is unresolved, obscured in “mortal sadness,” “gentle resignation,” and “sad and reciprocal pity.” There’s no redemption here, nothing but the darkness, the fractured beauty of the effort to chart the territory, the gravity of having lived.

Jaya Aninda Chatterjee, an editor at Yale University Press, lives in Cheshire, Connecticut.

Her books have been long-listed by Publishers Weekly as top 50 forthcoming titles, well reviewed in the American Interest, Arts & Letters Daily, Dissent, the Economist, the Financial Times, the Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, the Literary Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Nation, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, the TLS, and the Wall Street Journal, recommended by TIME (as most “accessible and illuminating for the general interest reader”) and the Washington Post, and excerpted in the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harper’s, and Lapham’s Quarterly. One was awarded the biennial W. Bruce Lincoln Prize by the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, while another was awarded Honorable Mention for the Joseph Rothschild Prize by the ASN and shortlisted for a prize in Central European Studies.

A graduate of Wellesley College, Columbia University, and the Yale Publishing Course, Jaya has spoken on panels at Yale, Georgetown University, American University, and the Indo-American Arts Council Literary Festival, taught at the Los Angeles Review of Books/University of Southern California Publishing Workshop, and contributed reviews and review essays to the LA Review of Books, NPR.org, and the TLS. A panel of judges from Publishers Weekly, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, and the Frankfurt Book Fair named her one of the most promising publishing professionals as part of their Star Watch program, and profiled her in PW Magazine. She was recently profiled in the Wellesley Magazine, too.

A classically trained musician, Jaya is a first soprano in the Greater Middletown Chorale, an auditioned ensemble for experienced singers, a student of voice at The Hartt School, and a student of cello at Neighborhood Music School.